536 Philosophy poems

Some things lock in competition, like an earthquake and a kiss. While a decision is waiting to be made, neither side of the argument progresses. The earthquake, though eager to prove its claim, shows valiant restraint; the kiss? It knows the power of bitten tongues. Such stand-offs as these precede most gains (stance of knowing too much and fearing too late). The tongues, shaking along with the house, say nothing shattering at all. With progress, not only earthquakes but kisses will be predicted. The last fine line between feeling and fact will choose a good point, and end. Flattery will continue to make us immortal in the difficult years between the first word and the lost. * In which Mary, herself a palette of grays, inhabitant of a universe void of color, gains access to the complete scientific story of what makes red red—and reads it.

That was the day your mesmerized went awol on the shore. Each star, you said, was the same star. Beneath our sunny beach blanket an anonymous moisture spread like fur. It’s getting dark and darker. Dusk is hard. Gossip travels worst when it’s low-contrast out; it stalls, and the air begins to crack. Droplets black as blood squeeze through fissures, making night. What came from above—the forestscan, the cornucump, the mar—came violently on our feet. Finally, when it was time to order, you pulled yourself up from the syntax we’d shared and beckoned for me to come. It’s just like rain, I said, as if to make amends. Every arm is the same arm, you replied, and took mine. * In which an unwitting traveler to a parallel universe, offered trum and toke all night, drinks himself out of his depth to drown the unknown source of his discomfort.

I gave my thoughts a golden peach, A silver citron tree; They clustered dumbly out of reach And would not sing for me. I built my thoughts a roof of rush, A little byre beside; They left my music to the thrush And flew at eveningtide. I went my way and would not care If they should come and go; A thousand birds seemed up in air, My thoughts were singing so.

Based on Epictetus APPROACH LIFE AS IF IT WERE A BANQUET Your rightful portion averts your ireful potion: Caress what can’t be blessed, cup shadows under breasts. Let pass what’s out of   ken: lover, job, riches, a ripe peach until it reaches you. Bring salt for your honey, lime for your grenadine. Money’s not your fault. You’re a feathered peahen preening for marzipan men. Impeccable models, often peccable, drop their pants at inopportune instants. Implore no more for what is, is no more. EVERYTHING HAS TWO HANDLES Whether to grapple the hurt or hold the calm: Can reason spread where ire infests the mind? The handle you refuse to grasp proclaims you more than one you lurch to reach. Why mire in the right/wrong amphora song. No vigilance in this choir of one. No fast hook in the urn’s broken-off arm. Vie with hot verities. The pie is getting cold. OUR DUTIES ARE IN RELATION TO ONE ANOTHER Feel unique in roiling solitude? Oh, you are not alone though you may feel fallen, snow up your nose. Join with others in your dank reclusion. How do you find something worth saying? How do you find desire to find desire to find something worth saying? And yes. That is where you might be: twice — or is it thrice — removed in a receding mirror of acedia. Finding a way to find a way to want to find a way back in to conversation. This is what negative numbers (a negative soul) feel like: You want to want to want ... If   you go back far enough — lateral excavation — will you hit bone? So many converging lines yakking to themselves over a haywire switchboard you used to find out who you were through cookie crumbs tossed down your own path. Now that you have no crumbs, don’t even have pockets to turn out—only the memory of such acts, such things. How weary, stale, and profligate it seems to be to plasticize these lines. You’re in a hamless state of mind. Now get out and talk to anyone your age: Like you they’ve all got Death studded on the tongue, which livelies up the talk they walk.

You who see our homes at night and the frail walls of our conscience, you who hear our conversations droning on like sewing machines —save me, tear me from sleep, from amnesia. Why is childhood—oh, tinfoil treasures, oh, the rustling of lead, lovely and foreboding— our only origin, our only longing? Why is manhood, which takes the place of ripeness, an endless highway, Sahara yellow? After all, you know there are days when even thirst runs dry and prayer’s lips harden. Sometimes the sun’s coin dims and life shrinks so small that you could tuck it in the blue gloves of the Gypsy who predicts the future for seven generations back and then in some other little town in the south a charlatan decides to destroy you, me, and himself. You who see the whites of our eyes, you who hide like a bullfinch in the rowans, like a falcon in the clouds’ warm stockings —open the boxes full of song, open the blood that pulses in aortas of animals and stones, light lanterns in black gardens. Nameless, unseen, silent, save me from anesthesia, take me to Tierra del Fuego, take me where the rivers flow straight up, horizontal rivers flowing up and down.

Why is it eternity lasts a moment a moment eternity? Are you quiet enough to hear horned owls at dawn? I hear voices rustle in the leaves after they are gone. New mice burst into life.   Small raccoons bear tiny chains around their wrists.

Thy praise or dispraise is to me alike: One doth not stroke me, nor the other strike.

There was an ancient well-site beneath the labyrinth I did not reach, the part underground, labeled (what else?) The Crypt. But labels always hide something about what they seem to define. They set the thing apart without disclosing why. Alive costs a pretty penny to see The Crypt now.

In the cards and at the bend in the road we never saw you in the womb and in the crossfire in the numbers whatever you had your hand in which was everything we were told never to put our faith in you to bow to you humbly after all because in the end there was nothing else we could do but not to believe in you still we might coax you with pebbles kept warm in the hand or coins or the relics of vanished animals observances rituals not binding upon you who make no promises we might do such things only not to neglect you and risk your disfavor oh you who are never the same who are secret as the day when it comes you whom we explain as often as we can without understanding

For longer than by now I can believe I assumed that you had nothing to do with each other I thought you had arrived whenever that had been more solitary than single snowflakes with no acquaintance or understanding running among you guiding your footsteps somewhere ahead of me in your own time oh white lakes on the maps that I copied and gaps on the paper for the names that were to appear in them sometimes a doorway or window sometimes an eye sometimes waking without knowing the place in the whole night I might have guessed from the order in which you turned up before me and from the way I kept looking at you as though I recognized something in you that you were all words out of one language tracks of the same creature